Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Watered the greenhouse. Better to mist from a distance rather than having the hose too close to the seedlings. Make sure the water saturates the entire pod of soil. Morning watering can be heavy, as the heat of the day will make sure it doesn’t stay too moist.

Filled seedling trays with soil. A nice, relatively mindless task.

Helped to uncover the coldframes.

Planted a variety of bok choy (joi choi) into seedling trays. 1 or 2 seeds per cell. The seeds were small and difficult to handle, so sometimes more fell in. Will just have to thin later if they all sprout.

Went on a gas run – took empty gas cans to the gas station and filled them up. Apparently, tractors run on gasoline. Also visited the hardware store and the auto-parts store for various items, drill batteries, hydraulic tubing, tractor battery…

Had a very interesting talk on soil science, samples and testing after lunch. Will talk more about this later, but this farm has really nice soil. The most important things, pH and organic matter, were right in the zone. Other things that come up are nitrogen (also very important but hard to measure reliably), phosphorus, cation exchange capacity, several other nutrients, any pollutant problems.

Finished up the day preparing potatoes for planting, which will probably happen, or at least get started, tomorrow. Cut seed potatoes into chunks, making sure that each chunk has at least one or more good eyes. Small, new potato-sized ones went in whole, big ones would be cut into as many as four separate chunks.

1 comment:

Thank you for the frequent posts! Glad the weather is holding for this first week. I hope you got some good hand cream or something like that. Aquaphor is very good...feels like vaseline but absorbs quite quickly.